Noise
by medicgirl
Summary: Sometimes the noise just gets too loud to deal with yourself. Good thing MacGyver has someone to help drown it out


Authors note: Ever just have one of those weeks where you wish you had never gotten out of bed? Well, thats been this week for me. This self-indulgent bit of angst was part of the result. Im not proud of it, but writing it kept me from losing it. Also, I know that echoes are more associated with the autistic spectrum, as I have them frequently, but my brother also does and he is not. He just has an eidedic memory, especially fofor sound. Anyway, flames are pointless, as usual I write for fun and share because I like when you guys do the same!

Blue eyes snapped open, trying hard to focus on the faint pink stain on the ceiling of Jack's guest room (his room) that wouldn't come out from a prank that causes his cherry 7-up to explode a year ago. That was a good day, even though he was recovering from a stomach bug (which Jack insisted on calling "stomach flu", even though he repeatedly explained there was no such thing), he had been feeling much better and Jack had gotten him good. His t-shirt and sweats had been pink and sticky, but they had both needed the laugh after his fever had spiked the night before. And the stain on the ceiling stubbornly refuses to come out of the white plaster.

He stared at the spot, trying to soak up some of the good feelings from that memory, but the noise in his head drowned it out. Jack picked on him about having a photographic memory, and he constantly corrected him that it was an eidetic memory, but it was just their usual banter. He had never wanted to share with his best friend the downside of that memory, and one look at the shadows under his eyes when he showed up at Jack's apartment at a little after one and Jack didn't push. "I just need a place I can rest. I can't at home." He barely managed to stop himself before he said "there's too much noise there" because Bozer was out of town and he really, really didn't want to explain that the noise was all in his head.

Jack just nodded and handed him the beer he had in his hand. He took it for a second, then handed it back. As much as he wanted to shut up the noise in his head chemically, there was always the chance it would just make it louder and more obnoxious and he just couldn't take that tonight. Before he could ask, Jack had made him a cup of his famous hot chocolate and set it in front of him on the coffee table.

Mac raised an eyebrow, but before he could ask, Jack shrugged and said he had been about to fix some anyway. On any other day, Mac would have questioned just how Jack thought hot chocolate would go with beer, but he was just not on top of his game. They finished watching the second Captain America movie Jack was half an hour into, and Mac felt his body begin to relax in the friendly (safe) environment. Jack never once asked him what was wrong, but was his usual snarky self, though maybe not as much as usual, and was oddly attentive. He brought in popcorn, more hot chocolate, and a faded Texas AM blanket Mac particularly liked and tossed it to him.

By the end of the movie, it was nearly three and both were yawning. "Think you can sleep, or you wanna see if we can find anything on Netflix?" Jack asked, trying to hide the fact that he was wiped out.

As much as Mac wanted to lose himself in something, he really didn't want to keep Jack awake, so he shook his head. "Nah, should try. Might get called in tomorrow."

"Nope," Jack said. "We're on No-Call tomorrow. Matty's orders."

Mac frowned. "But-" then shook his head. "Never mind, I don't actually care. Gift horses and all…" He gathered his socks into his shoes and pulled the blanket up to lay down on the couch.

"No way, bud," Jack said, putting his hand from Mac's shoulder to under his arm and helping him to his feet. "You look like hell, and you ain't gonna get the rest you need camping out on the couch. Got your bed all made up, and you can take the blanket with you. Come on, unless you want me to carry you…"

The smirk on the end of the statement made Mac roll his eyes. "No, I think I can manage fifteen feet without collapsing from exhaustion…" He fought the urge to stick his tongue out at Jack, but he did gather up the maroon Aggies blanket in his arms and take it with him.

Nevertheless, Jack didn't take his hand off the bottom of his upper arm until they were at the door. A faded black t-shirt with pictures of different types of weapons scattered over the front and an old pair of workout shorts were already laid neatly on the bed for him. Because of course he only had what he had been wearing when he left on, none of which would have been comfortable. Giving Jack a confused look, the older man shrugged. "Just in case you came by."

Mac wasn't sure if he was confused or just tired and overwhelmed and it would make sense when his adult brain was back online, so he just smiled. "Thanks, Jack." His eyes were already drooping.

But, less than three minutes later, changed, lights out, and tucked under the blankets, he was wide awake again. Staring at the cherry soda stain like it held all the answers. The reason he always corrected Jack about the photographic memory thing was that sounded so benign. Pictures were safe. Useful, even, given what they did. What wasn't useful was something referred to as "echoes" by the few people who study the phenomenon. Basically the same thing as the pictures, but with sounds, words, things he had heard, everything from Metallica lyrics to the dialogue to A Charlie Brown Christmas. But that was ok. Annoying sometimes, having an annoying song stuck in his head (or that God-awful week after watching The LEGO Movie with Jack's niece four times in one day), but tolerable. The real problem with it is that the sorting system is either completely random, or run by the most sadistic intelligence Mac had ever encountered. Because it also replayed everything anyone had ever said to him, and when it got out of control, it was like being stuck in a whirlpool, trying not to drown, while everything bad anyone has ever said to him playing at once.

Mac would never go as far as to say he was a picture of psychological health, but given pretty much his entire life, he thought he was fairly stable. He had done things and seen things that he still saw in his dreams and that he knew he would have to answer to whatever God actually ran things someday, but he was generally okay. But when this happens, he is anything but.

There were words in his past that had hurt at the time, but not anymore. The bullies from school, all the abuse he had taken over refusing to carry a gun in the army, all the times in the beginning when his asshole overwatch had made fun of him before said overwatch had become the closest thing to family he had. That stuff had no power over him anymore. Heck, he threw that old stuff back at Jack just to pick on him. But not everything was that easy.

He closed his eyes as the onslaught began. Himself at four, reading Stuart Little to his mother in a doctors office waiting room, her encouraging him on, telling him he was so smart and was going to grow up and save the world. His father, days after she passed, when he asked when she was coming back. "She isn't, ever. You're too smart not to know that!" "I'm not putting her pictures back up, I can't look at her all the time! Think about someone besides yourself for a change!" His grandfather, trying to explain to him that his father wasn't coming back. His grandfather talking on the phone to someone when he thought ten-year-old Mac was asleep. "I just don't know what to do. He's a great kid, but he's so damn smart the school doesn't know what to do with him. I'm too old to be making these decisions!"

Over and over, louder and louder inside his head. Knowing it was no help, he wrapped his arms around his head anyway, trying to drown out the onslaught. Every time his father yelled at him simply for being a child. Kindergarten when the teacher called him a liar when he tried to tell her he already knew his shapes up to a dodecagon. His father yelling at him, asking why he couldn't just act normal, the sound of the open hand hitting his cheek when he asked him how. The kind nurse trying to explain to him in kids terms that his mom wasn't going to leave the hospital this time and excusing herself quickly when he asked what her cardiac output and oxygen saturation was. He had taught himself to read when he was three, and advanced very quickly, but no one would give him real information. He could remember every time they told him she was going away or going to be with the angels. He could hear everything his dad had called him when he finally had a tantrum and insisted she wasn't going away, that she was going to die and not be anymore and why won't they tell him real stuff, the doctors quiet words, insisting his father take him home at least for the night. His brain rang with everything his father called him after he had to leave the hospital to take him home.

The tears he had been fighting through the whole barrage inside his brain finally broke loose and streamed down his cheeks when he heard his mother's last words to him before his father sent him away in the days before she died.

He had had these attacks most of his life, but they got worse every time and he couldn't drown them out by himself and he had hoped that not being home alone would be enough to stop it, but it hit him with the force of a hurricane. His breathing had sped up and his heart was racing. It felt like a panic attack, except… well he could sometimes talk himself out of those. He wouldn't even hear himself try with these.

The shrink his high school had sent him to after the whole blowing up the football field thing had called these "echo storms" and told him the best way to deal with them was to override them with something that captured his focus. When he was younger and obsessed with whatever project he was into, it would sometimes work. Out in the field, the occasional one would make things hard but his iron focus could stay where it had to be. But one day every year, it got so bad that nothing could override it. Nothing he had tried yet could even ease off the torment. Everyone valued his brain so highly, tonight he would gladly give it away to someone if it would just make all this stop!

And suddenly, there was a hand on the back of his head, and a cool cloth being wiped across his eyes, cooling the burning skin and gently wiping away the salt in his tears. "It's ok, kid, I'm here. You're not alone buddy, you don't have to do this alone. Talk to me if you can, if you can't that's okay too, I can talk for both of us if I need to, okay, Mac? You're ok, just try to slow your breathing, your heart is beating out of your chest."

"Jack," he almost whispered in a broken voice that made him sound half his age. He leaned into the hand on his head and pained brown eyes met his and held them. His face was still red and burning, but he tried hard to stop the tears. Jack laid the wet rag on the back of his neck and his hand on top of it.

"Yeah, I'm here. What can I do? Music? New documentary on that big physics machine over in Switzerland? We could got tune up the turbo on the GTO, yeah, I'll actually let you mess with one of the cars if you need to…"

The smile didn't quite reach his lips, but it shone in his tear-filled eyes, and that was something at least. He wiped his eyes on the shoulder of the shirt and laid his forehead on Jack's shoulder. "I know it sounds really stupid and childish…"

He paused, and Jack had to nudge him to get him to continue. Still unable to look up and risk seeing derision or belittling in Jack's eyes at his request, he mumbled into the older man's shoulder. "I'm really, really sorry buddy but I didn't get that. I'll do what I can but I gotta know what you need."

Looking down at the floor, he repeated louder, "tell me a story? Please? Not a work story, something from back in Texas, or something…" something safe…

Without hesitation, letting his southern drawl deepen, Jack immediately launched into a story about him and some high school friends going camping when he was younger. He told silly, pointless details about the leaves starting to fall and the crunch of them beneath his hiking boots as they headed to their usual clearing and the smell of the woods in late summer/early fall, telling him about how after they set up camp, they saw the shadow of a pack of coyotes just outside of the firelight. How they only had a .22 rifle between the four of them and only a pocketful of ammo, and they were too afraid to get away from the fire that seemed to hold them at bay to run. The tension slowly drained from Mac's shoulders as he tried to imagine a teenage Jack Dalton huddles around a campfire with other kids, staring down a pack of coyotes all night until dawn revealed the shapes to be just pieces of a fallen tree the landowner has cut up, but not hauled in yet. He was almost laughing as Jack concluded by saying that very day he bought a high-powered spotlight and never camped without it again. But he kept talking, telling his boy about Mama Dalton fixing her famous pork chop breakfast for the pack of exhausted kids, and had ushered him straight to bed as soon as he finished his morning chores, and how later that night his dad had given him his older .30-.06 rifle Jack borrowed often to hunt, but he no longer needed permission, because if they had really been a pack of coyotes, the boys could have been dinner if the pack was very large.

From there, he told him about practicing with the rifle until he could take a walnut off a tree at 80 yards 19 out of 20 times. How he never even went hiking without it until he got his first handgun and realized how much easier it was to carry with him. He could see the lines of hurt and stress leaving Mac's face slowly, and for some reason, his goofy childhood story seemed to be helping, so he did what he did best (besides watching the kid's back, which this seemed to be accomplishing too, from the looks of things) and kept talking until leaning against his shoulder seemed to be all that was holding him up.

Focusing on the tone and rhythm of Jack's voice threw a rope into the whirlpool that was pulling him down. He clung to it tightly and was slowly able to replace the echoes with the silly story and the grounding cadence of his friend's voice.

Jack smiled as the kid relaxed. He had read about what Mac seemed to be experiencing when he wanted to understand a little more about how his friend's mind worked. These "echoes" were mostly an annoyance, but to someone with as painful a past as his boy had lived, they could be debilitating. There were only a few times that he had seen it hit him this hard, but he had been expecting it. He just wished Mac would confide in him about them so he could do more than just guess his way around… Usually he would ask, but somehow saying "So, I've been googling your brain and I have some questions…" seemed weird, even for them.

Finally, he had to pause to think up another story, and Mac finally looked up with a weak smile. "How did you know?"

Wondering if he had accidentally spoken out loud, he replied with the intelligent and witty "Huh?"

"Your door was unlocked. You has the hot chocolate made when I got here, but never made any more for yourself. The bed was made up, sleep clothes laid out… and I'm absolutely certain I didn't make enough noise in here for you to hear me. So how did you know?"

Jack's grin faded, sadness filling his eyes for his young friend. He smoothed down the messed up blond hair, trying very hard not to see the young man as the sad kid he looked very much like. "Come on, Mac… I've been watching your six for a long time now… You didn't really think I forgot your mom's birthday, did you?"


End file.
